The Future of Consumerist

Over the last twelve years, Consumerist has been a steadfast proponent and voice on behalf of consumers, from exposing shady practices by secretive cable companies to pushing for action against dodgy payday lenders. Now, we’re joining forces with Consumer Reports, our parent organization, to cultivate the next generation of consumer advocacy.

Stay tuned as Consumerist’s current and future content finds its home as a part of the Consumer Reports brand. In the meantime, you can access existing Consumerist content below, and we encourage you to visit Consumer Reports to read the latest consumer news.

“Online piracy remains a concern and we undertake a variety of methods to mitigate its impact. During a short time on September 22, a vendor that assists with our content protection efforts mistakenly identified a small number of URLs as infringing, and sent copyright notices in error. These notices represented about 0.01% of the total notices they sent on our behalf that particular day, the remainder of which were correct and accurate.

No action was actually taken on these erroneous notices, and no links were removed, but we’re disappointed by the error and apologize for any inconvenience this caused. We put a lot of time, care and effort into ensuring this complicated process works correctly, and nobody is more bothered than us when it doesn’t. The issue has since been remedied, and necessary steps have already been taken to ensure this does not happen again.”

ORIGINAL TEXT:

Even though the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it illegal for a copyright holder to knowingly file a bogus copyright claim against someone else, that hasn’t stopped some of the biggest stakeholders in the entertainment industry from carelessly registering takedown complaints with Google for content that in no way infringes on anyone’s copyright.

A driver in New York City has repeatedly gone out to her car and found she couldn’t drive it because once again her vehicle had been booted due to hundreds of dollars in unpaid parking fines. Problem is, this driver says she’s never been ticketed and that she’s being punished for the bad behavior of someone else who had the same vanity license plate number. [More]

Being an early adopter of something has its privileges and its disadvantages. Chris joined Gmail early enough that he gets to have an address that consists of his first two initials and his very common last name. That’s pretty neat for him, but has led to a really annoying case of mistaken identity. He keeps getting someone else’s Redbox receipts. A person who has a similar name, but lives in a different state and rents from Redbox an awful lot. The good news? Redbox has a solution for this. Kinda. [More]